NEW YORK — Shelley Lanman offered a forceful argument in favor of a brand integrating online marketing elements into what had traditionally been its use of offline media.
Lanman, executive vice president, chief creative officer at Draft, New York, was a speaker at yesterday's Direct Marketing Club of New York monthly luncheon.
One of the case studies she presented was an effort for Audi's A8L automobile. The numbers were hard to ignore. A previous effort in 2002 without an online component produced 78 Audis sold, including 33 A8Ls. However, Draft's 2003 campaign produced 600 sales of the featured model out of 1,800 Audis sold overall.
“The notion of moving from offline to online, or putting the two together, is not so much that we do it, but it's how we do it,” she said.
Lanman cited specific goals from the client regarding the third generation of the car model. They included raising awareness, getting people excited and engaged, generating leads for dealerships and developing a system to qualify those leads.
“Previous marketing efforts for this car really bore little fruit, and therefore the client was not inclined to give it enormous budgets,” she said.
Two key targets for the campaign were Audi owners and owners of other luxury cars. The qualities focused on included innovative technology, intuitive engineering and luxurious design. Prior efforts included traditional offline direct mail and print.
“We had a different idea. We certainly continued to recommend direct mail and print, but to that we added rich media banners, including some phenomenal eyeblasters, HTML e-mails,” she said. “And we started the program three months [before] the car's availability so we could soften up the marketplace, get people excited, start pushing leads out to the dealerships and getting things going. We developed a registration database in order to collect and track all of the leads.”
Lanman described the target audience as smart, rich, hungry for information and comfortable researching online. Other metrics revealing the success of the 2003 effort included more than 12,000 qualified leads.
“The banners were a great addition to the program,” she said. “They outperformed expectations [with a] 7 percent response rate.”
Other speakers at the luncheon included True North Inc.'s Tom Goosmann, chief creative officer, and Neil H. Feinstein, director of creative strategy.
